I never planned to become a climate activist,
but now things have changed,
and now, standing here as a climate activist,
I ask you all to become one too.
Here's why,
and most importantly, how.
Ten years ago, when I was 13 years old,
I first learned about the greenhouse effect.
Back then, we spent 90 minutes on this issue,
and I remember finding it quite irritating
that something so fundamental
would be squeezed into a single geography lesson.
Some of this irritation remained, so when I graduated from high school,
I decided to study geography
just to make sure I was on the right track with this whole climate change thing.
And this is when everything changed.
This was the first time I looked at the data,
at the science behind the climate crisis,
and I couldn't believe what I was reading.
Like many of you,
I thought that the planet wasn't really in a good state.
I had no idea that we are rushing into this self-made disaster
in such rapid pace.
There was also the first time I understood what difference it makes
when you consider the bigger picture.
Take the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, for instance,
the number one driver for global warming.
Yes, this looks bad.
This looks like we are on a pretty bad track,
but it's only once you don't just consider the last 60 years,
but the last 10,000 years,
that you understand how terrifying this really is.
And this is just one aspect of the crisis we are seeing.
I'm not going to get into details here, but let me tell you so much:
we are in a point of history
that the most destructive force on the planet is humanity itself.
We are in a point of history
that no scientist could guarantee you that you will survive this.
We are in a point of history
that humanity is creating an environment
that's not safe for humans anymore.
Yeah, there I was,
first year of a geography,
and pretty overwhelmed,
but there was good news.
The very same year I first learned about all this,
leaders from across the globe came together in Paris
to decide on the common target to limit global warming to below two degrees.
Pictures went around the world,
and I was told that history was made that day.
How relieving, right?
Except, something didn't quite work out about this.
After this agreement was signed,
things didn't really get better.
Actually, they got much worse.
Decision-makers and industries, leaders and politicians,
they went back to business as usual,
exploiting our livelihoods like there is literally no tomorrow,
building coal power plants again and again
even though we know that needs to stop,
according to the Paris agreement.
So while there are also good developments, of course,
there are installations of wind and solar energy all over the globe, yes,
but these positive changes are slow, too slow in fact.
So since the Paris Agreement was find,
climate graphs keep raising to the top,
smashing records every year.
The five hottest years ever recorded
were the previous five years,
and at no time have global emissions been higher than today.
So there I was,
seeing and understanding the science on the one side,
but not seeing answers, not seeing the action, on the other side.
At that point, I had enough.
I wanted to go to the UN Climate Conference myself,
that very place that was created to bring people together
to fix the climate,
except not really, apparently.
This was last year.
I traveled to the Climate Conference
and wanted to find out what is this really like, what is this about?
For political realists,
this might be no surprise,
but I found it hard to bear
that fossil fuel industries and political leaders
are doing everything, everything to prevent real change from happening.
They are not keen to set targets that are ambitious enough
to put us on a below two-degree pathway.
After all, these are the only ones who benefit from this climate crisis, right?
The fossil fuel industry generates profits
and political leaders, well, they look at the next election,
at what makes them popular,
and I guess that's not asking the inconvenient questions.
There is no intention for them to change the game.
There is no country in the world where either companies or political powers
are sanctioned for wrecking the climate.
With all the strangeness and the sadness about this conference,
there was one someone who was different,
someone who seemed to be quite worried,
and that was Greta Thunberg.
I decided right there that everything else seemed hopeless
and didn't seem to make sense,
so I joined her climate strike right there at the conference.
It was my very first climate strike ever
and an incredibly strange setting,
just me and her sitting there at this conference hall
surrounded by this busyness of the suit-wearing conference crowd
who had no idea what to do with us.
And yet, this felt more powerful
than anything I had expected in a very long time,
and it was right there that I felt it was maybe time to start striking in Germany.
I was now certain that no one else was going to fix this for us,
and if there was just a slightest chance that this could make a difference,
it seemed almost foolish not to give it a go.
(Applause)